Black Box Exposures: Enriching Public Engagement with Human-Data Relations Through Intermedial Performance Strategies

Through a combination of this artistic and scholarly research rooted in praxis, this dissertation demonstrates how the medium of theatre provides an accessible, alternative laboratory space wherein the changing relations between humans, data and informatics may be examined. This study begins by examining several topics: the diverse array of analogies and metaphors that currently characterize data out in the world; popular notions surrounding data as a material for ‘telling stories’ about events, objects or people; and growing communities of practice that prioritize intimate and hand-made forms of engagement with data as material for creative expression. In the process, the metaphor of a black box is established as an evocative means of conjoinment between theatre studies, critical data studies and information design, while identifying three salient cross-disciplinary themes—velocities, assemblages, and representativeness. These three themes provide a useful framework for examining several recent theatrical productions wherein aspects of data production, processing and representation are juxtaposed with lived human experiences. These themes are further elaborated through two praxis-based experiments designed and run by the author: a collection of intermedial performance prototypes and an experimental university course. Drawing upon methods and materials developed by the Quantified Self Movement and the Data Humanism Movement, both experiments emphasized strategies of creative resistence in which the activities of data production, processing and representation are explored through forms of enactment. The resulting contribution is a provisional model for both artistic and pedagogical praxis in which these activities are translated into ‘stages of informatic enactment.’ Infused with the methods, practices and sensibilities of the Quantified Self and Data Humanism movements, this model encourages intimate and bespoke forms of creative engagement with data in a performing arts context, but with a greater emphasis on exploring the underlying systems and processes that produce it.Ph.D